Unclaimed stocks held by the Korea Securities Depository have approached 1.5 trillion won. The number of unclaimed shareholders has exceeded 26,000, while the average amount of stocks returned to owners through a recovery campaign over the past five years has only reached 55.7 billion won annually.
According to data submitted by Han Min-soo, a member of the National Assembly's Political Affairs Committee, as of the end of August this year, the Korea Securities Depository was holding 800,844,418 unclaimed shares, valued at approximately 1.4707 trillion won.
Unclaimed stocks arise when shareholders fail to collect shares issued through capital increases or stock dividends. This often occurs because shareholders are unaware of the issuance or do not receive notifications due to address changes.
These unclaimed stocks are held by the Korea Securities Depository and other registration agencies.
As of the end of last year, there were 763,536,816 unclaimed shares valued at 1.4443 trillion won, indicating an increase of about 26.4 billion won in value over the past eight months.
The number of unclaimed shareholders has also risen, increasing from 25,349 at the end of last year to 26,280 by the end of August, an increase of 931. Among them, individual shareholders number 22,526, while corporate shareholders total 3,754.
The largest individual unclaimed stock case involved 644,247 shares valued at 70.67 billion won. For corporations, the highest was 42,227,674 shares worth 211.14 billion won.
The amount of unclaimed dividends is also significant, with individual shareholders missing out on approximately 5.6 billion won and corporations about 170 million won.
In contrast, the Korea Securities Depository has returned a total of 278.3 billion won in unclaimed stocks to shareholders through its recovery campaign over the past five years, averaging about 55.7 billion won annually, which is roughly 3.9% of the unclaimed stock balance at the end of last year.
The Korea Securities Depository conducts this campaign annually, sending notifications by mail to verified addresses of unclaimed shareholders through the Ministry of the Interior and Safety.
However, last year, only 9,492 notifications were sent, reaching less than half of the total unclaimed shareholders of 25,349 at the end of the previous year. This has raised concerns about the criteria for selecting recipients and verifying addresses.
Han Min-soo stated, "A more proactive campaign is needed, including cooperation with the three major telecommunications companies to send text notifications. Over 1 trillion won in stocks are still waiting for their owners, and we must assess whether the current notification methods and collection procedures are sufficient."
* This article has been translated by AI.
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